Vestiaire Collective sells secondhand luxuries far below retail, such as Chanel tweed jackets for $1,500 and Fendi handbags for $650. It just became the first apparel marketplace to offer carbon credits as well.
The Paris-based peer-to-peer reseller is translating the carbon emissions saved by customers’ secondhand purchases into credits to fund its goal of a “100 percent circular business.”
“The ambition is to create a virtuous cycle, where measurable environmental performance generates the financial resources needed to scale it further,” according to Vestiaire’s “Shaping a Circular Future” 2025 report, released Oct. 3 along with its credits program.
Carbon credits are typically associated with high-emitting sectors such as steel or shipping, but Vestiaire argues that fashion belongs in that category too.
“For me, the idea of building revenue through impact work is very critical,” said Vestiaire Collective Impact Director Hortense Pruvost.
That said, critics warn that the carbon credits program is unintentionally encouraging overconsumption and even greenwashing.
Circular fashion
The fashion industry creates between 2 and 8 percent of global carbon dioxide pollution, depending on how one measures such things.
Vestiaire Collective is pricing its credits at almost $40 per metric ton of CO2 equivalent. It plans to offer 25,000 credits per year through Inuk, a Paris firm that verifies carbon credits.
In Pruvost’s view, making Vestiaire’s circular model viable through credits will advance sustainability in the industry. Buying pre-owned instead of new clothing offers 42 percent lower climate and energy impacts, according to a 2023 study in the Journal of Circular Economy.
“We’re definitely very combative about fast fashion and throwaway fashion in general,” Pruvost said of its mission to offer high-end, long-lasting goods. It lists items from more than 13,000 labels including Chanel, Missoni, Versace and Zegna. Vestiaire not only bans ultrafast brands such as Shein, but also more than 60 mass-production mall brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap, H&M and Zara.
Vestiaire operates differently from other secondhand fashion sites. Virtual thrift shop Vinted, now France’s top clothing retailer, has lower overhead and less expensive goods. The Lithuanian company quadrupled its profits in 2024. Luxury San Francisco reseller The RealReal appears to be approaching a break-even point.
For Vestiaire, which has not reached profitability after 15 years, the carbon credits provide critical support. Most of its emissions come from shipping products, and the company creates no goods. However, for roughly one-third of sales, shoppers request authentication at a Vestiaire warehouse. Fending off knockoffs adds $17.56 per item. Authentication technologies eat up the equivalent of 12 percent of the company’s revenue, according to Vestiaire.
That threatens the company’s efforts to advance circularity, according to Pruvost. Artificial intelligence tools and digital product passports may offer future help, and add costs, against increasingly sophisticated counterfeiters, she added.
How the credits work
The carbon credits, available on Inuk’s website (French), are meant to attract institutional buyers that wish to support a circular economy.
Vestiaire partnered with Inuk to develop a new methodology rather than seek a global third-party certification body such as Verra or Gold Standard, according to Pruvost.
New Jersey firm AmSpec validates Inuk’s methods.
To arrive at a conservative estimate of avoided emissions for circular flows of goods, Inuk’s methodology considered a secondhand “substitution rate” of 85 percent, a measure of the pre-loved purchases that replace the need for new items. Inuk also considered a “rebound effect” that may lead a secondhand shopper to buy more clothes, in addition to the assumption that used items don’t last as long as new ones.
“This is a very novel space,” said Alena Raymond, senior principal life cycle analysis practitioner at AmSpec. “There aren’t rules that fit every program out there, and so the approach here was to pull from existing standards and industry best practices within the space of quantifying avoided emissions.”
The avoided emissions program is specifically tailored to Vestiaire to encourage a circular economy, Raymond added. In addition, it follows multiple standards from the International Standards Organization regarding lifecycle assessments, greenhouse-gas quantification and carbon footprinting.
A close parallel to Vestiaire’s program emerged in September, when London-based Bloom ESG launched credits for emissions avoided by hardware recyclers.
Vestiaire’s credits signal the need for a circular economy to assist broader economic decarbonization, according to Sebastian Foot, founding partner of Bloom ESG. “Creating new incentives for circular models that reduce fast fashion and divert clothing from landfill should be embraced,” he said.
Rewards or risks?
Despite apparent good intentions, however, Vestiaire’s program risks greenwashing, according to Benja Baecks, an expert on global carbon markets with the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch in Brussels.
“These credits don’t represent genuine emission reductions; they’re simply monetizing existing consumer behavior,” she said. “It sends the wrong signal by suggesting that buying more clothes, albeit used ones, is helping fight climate change.”
Pruvost, on the other hand, sees a payoff in risking controversy. “I’m very confident in our approach, but I’m also happy to take the risk, because for me it goes beyond the voluntary carbon market,” she said. “It’s really looking at how we fund the circular transition that we all wish to see happen.”
